The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Productions of broadcast events like the Olympics and professional sports often include visual augmentation of replay footage to show key moments during races and competitions. For example, overlaid on a video of a ski run, an expert might draw an idealized path of a skier around a corner or may overlay the path of the fastest skier around the corner; the idealized or fastest version may be overlaid on video of other skiers, and the overlaid video may be broadcast to show the relative progress of the skiers through the course. With the right camera angle and distance, golf swing applications can identify major body parts and equipment, and can automatically add visual effects to show issues with posture and swing.
Millions of race-oriented toys are sold each year. In some electric race tracks, one person's car can crash into a wall and slow down, losing the race. In others, racers may drive radio-controlled cars around an open track and “shoot” one another with virtual “bombs” or “guns”; an opponent who is “hit” may slow enough to lose the race. In other competitions, such as those described in application Ser. No. 14/747,637, filed Jun. 23, 2015, titled, “Game Surface Adjustment”, the surface or other components of the track may be modified by digital activity, which modifications may cause an opponent to slow down.
For toys, it would be fun to record highlights of a competition, to show how or why someone won, without having to watch an entire video of the competition. However, the system described above in the case of skiers involves expensive human judgment and input, which just is not practical when thousands of people (or even more) may be using the system at the same time.
For augmented reality contests—contests involving real equipment which is augmented by computer-enabled digital objects—programmatically selecting video “highlights” is challenging because players engage in both real and virtual interactions.